Raju Venugopalan 
BNL, Stony Brook, and the Univ. of Edinburgh

The glue that binds us all: Nature's strong force and the 
origin of mass in the visible universe

The vast bulk of visible matter in our universe exists due to nature's strong 
force, whose fundamental constituents are quarks and gluons. One of the 
great achievements in physics is the development of a successful quantum 
theory of the strong force, Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), a 
theory of breathtaking simplicity on the surface but containing 
multitudes of riches within, a deeper understanding of which continues to 
elude us. I will provide an elementary introduction to QCD and its mysteries, 
outline its most striking achievements, discuss what problems endure and 
outline current and future experiments that aim to address them. Time 
permitting, I will briefly describe many-body features of QCD in extreme 
conditions and its interdisciplinary connections to other areas of physics 
across wide energy scales spanning black holes to ultracold atomic gases.
Speaker: Raju Venugopalan is a Distinguished Scientist at Brookhaven 
National Laboratory and an Adjunct Professor at Stony Brook University. He 
is currently the Royal Society Wolfson Visiting Fellow at Edinburgh 
University. Raju is a Fellow of the APS, and a recipient of the Humboldt 
Research Award, amongst other Honors. Raju's principal interest is in QCD, 
and he is best known for his seminal work as co-author of the Color Glass 
Condensate effective theory of QCD at high energies; his paper on the topic 
is one of 33 Physical Review D milestone papers in the last 50 years. Raju's 
current interest is on a remarkable classical double copy relation between 
strong fields in QCD and gravity, providing novel insight into Black Hole 
formation.

Wednesday, 11 March @ 4pm 
Physics West, W117